Katelynn I Hate You
by Paradoxal Reality
Summary: Dib is dead, but not by a means he would have foreseen. Who is Katelynn and who hates her? And why? Read. Find out. One shot.


A/Note: Yeah, I know.. long time, no update. Okay, I AM going to get Weapon's last chapter re-done and posted this week. Really. If anyone still cares. ^^; My computer died and took all my files with it not too long ago and I'm having to rebuild from my failure-prone memory alone. I'll try and make it worth your while. ^^; Same goes for Why Won't You Let Me Help You? (although actually there is a bit of that up in my lj.. check if you're interested in where that lunacy is going.)

Anyway, this is dark. This has a twist or two, and it takes place in oh… around high school. My attempt at something approaching suspense. Please let me know what you think- there's a shiny new quarter in it for ya! ^^; Rated for death, suicide, etc.. yay!

Katelynn  (I Hate You)

            I sit here watching you, and I hate you. 

            Every day I sit, watching you. Sometimes in the playground, sometimes in the cafeteria, and other times on the bus. Your hair is too thick, too long, and far too wavy. And another thing, your eyes are too green! And you know what? I hate you!

            You killed him. So it was actually Dib who swallowed the entire bottle of aspirin, one bitter, chalky pill at a time; does that make any difference after you crushed his heart, burned his spirit, and attempted to re-forge his soul into something you found more "palpable"? No, it was you. You killed him as surely as if you'd dropped a skyscraper on him. You killed what made him himself, and he couldn't survive that way.

            You got away with murder, and I can't stand it. Who told you that you could do it? Who gave you permission? He was all I had, and you had the gall to take him away, a piece at a time, until he was forced to self-destruct- decompressing from the void within.

            So I sit here, watching you. 

            It all seemed innocent enough at first. You moved here late last year, had few friends and spoke little. In the last two respects one might think you two had a lot in common. But you were a girl, he was a boy, and all the crap that seems to go along with that. Being forced to sit through Biology Class doesn't make it any easier to comprehend. You smiled at him once, or maybe you were actually smiling at the lunch he'd been wearing as a result of my ongoing fights with him. Who can say, really? Damn it, I loved fighting with him. Aggravation was just the mask my familiarity chose to wear. Only you know why you smiled, and I'm certainly not going to ask why. I doubt you would be truthful, anyway. But anyway you smiled at him, and he at you, and then you both were talking about that vacation you took last summer to the supposedly haunted house out in San Jose. I wish you'd stayed in San Jose. It would have been much better for all the rest of us. 

            It was a thin enough premise for a friendship. Your family was old and somewhat proud, tracing its lineage all the way back to the colonies at Massachusetts. Dib was intrigued by what you would tell him of your colorful history. You didn't believe ghosts existed but thought it would be interesting if they did, he believed they did exist and it would be nice if people acknowledged it. You'd debate, and fight, and argue, and scream at each other, and it was normal enough, I suppose. I've never been much for friends of the platonic or romantic kind myself, so I admit my knowledge is pretty limited. But your fights were the only normal thing about you two.  

            Then you'd make up, and compromise, and then it stopped being so normal. Your compromises seemed to be more of him giving in a bit at a time than you both agreeing to disagree. I asked him how things were going, and he'd cock his head to the side in that particular way, look up at the top rim of his glasses and say you just needed a little time to open your eyes. Then I heard you tell your friends (or should I just call them a flighty troupe of groupies?) that he just needed a little time to adjust as you put on that tiny, tiny bit of concealer around your eyes, claiming to not have slept well. Adjust? Adjust to what?

            And that's when I first suspected I might learn to hate you. I already didn't like you. As much of an annoyance as Dib is- was, he was a companion in his own way. A confidant to which one needs not speak. Mere syllables don't encompass the knowing suffering a glance can tell. You took up his time more and more, and I didn't like that. I thought at first that it was just me being selfish. After that day as I listened unnoticed from my perch high above your circle of friends who sat at the base of my favorite tree, after that day I knew you were not what you seemed to be to Dib. I wondered why you kept company with him, Katelynn. I wondered long and hard, and the only reason I could come up with was that he wasn't at all popular, but at least he wasn't entirely disgusting. I know how you **_hate_** anything that reeks of popularity, you and your elitist friends. 

            It was relieving to know it had not just been my jealousy that had warned me of you. My instincts were still sharp and trustworthy. And I found myself shunning everything that smelled of your strange foreign scent. Even Dib, irresponsible thing that I am. At least, that's how it turned out. 

            Dib wouldn't listen to the protests I did make. No matter the burden that you became, he wouldn't see it. He'd carry almost the entire contents of your locker around for you. He'd braid your hair if you saw fit to ask/tell him to do so. (Ugh.. how the sight of that disgusted me!) I have no doubt that if you'd told him to, he'd have moved into that cramped little apartment your 'wealthy and distant' parents had rented you and become your butler for the rest of his miserable existence at that point. 

            And I could do nothing, it seemed, but sit back and grow to hate you more and more and ask myself why Dib had to be so.. so _Dib. _Even as you siphoned off his personality a mannerism at a time, he retained enough Dibbishness to stubbornly see something in you that drew him to you like a moth to a streetlamp. Heh.. Dib.. Agent Mothman.. Ah yeah, I needed that laugh. But he was like a moth. Trying single-mindedly to be one with something he perceived as beautiful and marvelous until he destroyed himself. 

            Damn you, Dib.. didn't you know that destroying you was **my** job? Damn, damn, damn you, Dib!

            The two of you became almost synonyms. Dib and Katelynn. Katelynn and Dib. Sometimes corrupted by linguistic shorthand to KatelynnenDib by the breathless rush of recess and hurried tongues. You kept him on a short leash, and he rejoiced that he could be near you. Perhaps he rationalized what was happening to himself that way. I don't know. He wrote in his journal less and less as the days with you wore on, and then finally by the third month stopped altogether. After all the work I put into cracking his access codes to get access to it, I learned nothing. I had myself a good frustration-induced scream over that one. So I know nothing of what really went on in that big, thick head of his, only what he rationalized aloud to me on the rarer and rarer occasions that we spoke at all. 

            Perhaps you told him to avoid me. 

            You all seem to rush around me as I sit still all the time, but things were moving too fast, even for me. You wanted to know about monarch butterfly migration for your end of the year report, and he practically wrote the thing for you. You strictly scheduled his time during summer break, and amazingly he made excuses to not attend a father-son picnic to be with you. It was as if you'd put a spell on him, convincing him that to disobey your slightest whim would bring some horrible disaster. You pushed, you shoved, and when he showed some backbone at all, you came undone all over the place like an amorphous deep-sea creature washed up on a beach. You pushed and he was resolute. You screamed and he retorted. Then you'd cry and wail and start talking about how horrible life was and that you wanted to end it all. That always did it, and inevitably he'd relent. Stupid, stupid relenting Dib and his damnable compassion. 

            He claimed once that you were basically immature, and he was letting you grow and learn for yourself. He thought he was a sort of one-person support group for you. He said that he wanted to be there to see you become what he knew you could be. He considered himself many things, but didn't see until the end what he was: a host for a particular kind of parasite. I think he knew at the end. I think that's why he put himself down like an unwanted stray dog. If you poison the host, sometimes you can get the blood-suckers that are attached to it, too. 

            I've watched you, you know. And you are definitely a parasite.

            Katelynn, Katelynn. I hate you, you know. I'm more familiar with the back of your head than the back of my own hands. I spent so much time trying to burn a hole through your head that it's a wonder my own didn't explode from the frustration of constant disappointment. I still fail to see it. What did he see in you? Where is the shimmer of light that sealed his doom? Maybe you have to be a Dib to know that fatal incandescence and be transfixed by it. In any case, I don't see light from you. Just a sort of sickly, churning gray of disease looking for something to consume. And you consumed Dib, dark and pale and impressionable Dib. Ate him a bit at a time, like some sort of rare dessert. 

            Then in late summer, you suddenly announced you had to leave for a while. And you left on short notice for a trip North, to visit your parents. I was delighted at first.. I smiled to know that for a while he would be free of you for a bit. And perhaps given that break, he would see things more clearly and build up some immunity to your venomous presence. Possibly even sever the bond with you for good! And then I saw Dib. Not the old Dib, who'd energetically throw himself into hunting werewolves on telephone poles, but a new Dib who stared blankly, wandered bleakly, and never knew what to do with himself when you weren't around. I saw him, and I didn't know him. He was no longer **my** Dib, he was some stranger living in Dib's body, operating it without a license and with no regard to which way it was supposed to go. Dib was barely more than an empty shell, and I hated you. Not just the things you'd done, but you yourself. 

            I hated your long wavy hair that you'd make him brush and braid. I hated your too-bright green eyes that smirked at everything you saw. I hated the tilt of your head, the color and cut of your clothes, your speech, your mannerisms.. I hated everything about you and hated Dib for not being strong enough to break free of you back when there was still time, and I hated me for not just **making** him quit you like a bad habit and pummeling him senseless if and whenever he thought of you again! I've despised and loathed before, but this was the first time I'd really hated. 

            I knew then, but didn't want to believe. I didn't want to accept that I'd seen that there was nothing to do for him now. I've always been a hunter and a predator, but I didn't know what to do with Dib. He'd had a faintly glimmering bite about him once, but now it was gone. Gone and left him as nothing but someone else's chewed and mauled prey left for dead and probably soon enough to be. I went home and for the first time in my life, I cried for the frustration and failure and for the end that I could see coming now for him. 

            His personality had been eroded until there was nothing left. His spirit was fluttering like the shredded flag of a defeated rebellion. His spark, his life-zest, it was flickering, fading. It wasn't a surprise to find him there crouched on that lonely rooftop with an empty aspirin bottle in one hand, a small telescope in the other, and surrounded by the sensor equipment connected to the headphones that clutched feebly at his ears. Not a surprise, but still a shock. The body remembers things that the mind forgets, and perhaps it had been trying to recover the things that were missing. Never mind that his childhood telescope was far too small to see anything past the moon, and the listening device wasn't even plugged in. Whatever was left of Dib in that shell that was dying slowly around it felt incomplete and had recalled itself for a moment and gone searching for it. And when his sightless eyes and deafened ears (primitive and dull senses that they are to begin with) told him there was nothing there- Well it seems he endeavored to become one with whatever was at hand. In the sky, some see nothingness- a void spreading out with oppressive obliterating, decompressing might. Some see everything, the whole of existence reaching to embrace. I need not say which side of the fence I believe Dib was on, and which you sit under. At the end, I like to think he found his way out of your nothingness to find his everything again, but that's possibly just this silly sentimentality I've worked up talking. 

            You did this to him, to me, to both of us… and I hate you so thoroughly for it that I could explode. You.

            So Dib departed this world, guided by the wake of smothering self-doubt. You made it home about a week later, didn't you, Katelynn? I didn't see you receive the news, but I trust you managed to look appropriately shocked and mollified. I might have been able to let it go, if only I hadn't been standing there, ignored or unseen, when you told your current lot of air-headed friends that it was all too bad, and your one regret was never getting to quote.. snicker-giggle _know_ him giggle-choke-snicker, unquote.

            And so here I sit, hating you. Watching the back of your head as you talk to your friends. Funny how they seem to change nearly every week. I sit here hating everything about you. Those damnable green eyes that paralyze. That long wavy hair that appears so dark and black from a distance, but which Dib joyfully proclaimed "had a hint of silver" in it when the light hit it just right. The "not quite trendy" clothes you wear. The disparagingly grandiose way you speak. The way your head tilts when you show off your "good side". I hate it all and I hate **you.**

            Your hair **is** silvering a bit now, in the months after Dib's funeral, Katelynn. If it were not still summer, and the sun low and far away, one might think little of it. You must be running low on that concealer now, too; your eyes seem a little sunken and a touch old. I'm sure Dib's unfortunate demise has not been keeping you awake at night. I've made a study of you, and I find you to be more than a little suspicious. Your speech is too old and your glances too cunning. Your practiced habit of being just a little behind the times does little to hide the scent of the ages on you. On top of everything else, there was Dib. Stupid, curious, innocent Dib. I know what you are, even if the traditional explanation of a vampyre does include sucking blood and turning into bats rather than ambiguous age and the draining of life-energy through sheer proximity, if one overlooks the Hollywood embellishments and folklore hearsay methods, the symptoms are unmistakable. 

            I sit here watching, making notes. Because I hate you, Katelynn. Because you took him away. Because you're a life-draining, soul-destroying vampyre. 

            And I will destroy you. 

            I owe it to Dib, after all. What else can a sister do in such a situation? I owe Dib for what I let you do to him. And I owe you for doing it. Never let it be said that Gaz does not repay her debts. Soon, you parasite who seems to fancy herself a predator, soon you'll find out what real hunting is all about. 

A/Note: Yes! I mean it! Katelynn was/is a vampire! 


End file.
